Architectural Technologist – Dark Fibre

As if its a big sup prise to any one, that Google , Facebook, and properly Apple, are buying up the remains of the dark Fibre, you know the fibre optic cable left over from the last internet bubble, thats never been used.

If there is one thing that mucks up any overseas holiday, or my travel plans to visit universities to mark, is the crap service wifi and internet access via mobile pnesnwe get, particularly overseas, why oh why do I have to pay so much, and be limited in what I send, O2 have a 50mb limit, what !, I make a few photos and some video, and my mobile is looking to upload it to both Flickr Google, Apple and Dropbox, thats the first few days only of photos that eaten up the allowance, after that I am looking for free to access wifi, certainly thats what happened in the USA in October when we made a visit.

You might be wondering why I mention it on a CPD blog site, simple, it’s part of my running a practice whilst I travel rant. I need to keep in touch, I can more or less do this anywhere in the UK, I even take a peek at several sites that show the phone towers to see if I am heading into trouble, its even influenced my hotel choice, never believe a hotel when it says they have wifi, they might have, but it’s limited, or only free for 10 mins after which there is a huge fee. so now I look for masts. look at this database of mast sites, the map is very useful, zoom in to your location, the mast locations do not show until you really get close on.

So back to the original article, Google and the big boys buying up dark fibre, why not, its must be a major chink in their development plans to be controlled by these tin pot ex phone companies who control our access to the net, so why not start to deliver it them selves, best way to allow innovation, and stop the control.

so there it is, the CPD is check out the phone mast to get a reasonable signal, and if your overseas, check the hotel wifi first, it saves frustration and anger.